Speakers at UIKonf 2019

UIKonf hosts a diverse selection of inspiring speakers. We select and invite about half of our speakers. The other half is selected by our community through our anonymous call for proposals system. Details coming soon.

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Alaina Kafkes

Alaina Kafkes is a software engineer at Medium, where she works predominantly on iOS development and petting other people’s dogs. She has spoken and written extensively about the intersection of technology and the humanities. Current interests include swimming laps and baking with orange zest.

Anne Cahalan

Anne Cahalan is an iOS developer Detroit Labs, where she is constantly delighted by the niftiness of Swift. Passionate about clean code, craft cocktails, and nice yarn, she dreams of an elegantly-designed app that pairs cocktails with knitting patterns. She is contractually required to mention her three-legged cat, Wobbles.

Ellen Shapiro

Ellen Shapiro is an iOS and Android developer, writer, and speaker working in the Amsterdam office of Bakken & Bæck who has been building native apps for both iOS and Android since 2010. She’s written tutorials for RayWenderlich.com about iOS and Android since 2013, and is one of the authors of their Kotlin Apprentice book. In addition, she’s the primary developer on on Hum, a songwriting notebook app for iOS. When not coding, Ellen spends her time traveling, biking all over the Netherlands, and hanging out with her fiancée and their two cats.

Ellie Shin

Ellie Shin is a Senior iOS Engineer at Uber on the Mobile Platform Team. She has worked on building Uber’s Rider App and cares deeply about optimizing iOS apps and frameworks at scale. She has previously worked at Spotify and Microsoft among other companies, primarily on iOS.

Erica Sadun

Erica Sadun writes lots of books. When not writing or coding, she parents geeks who are brushing up on their world domination skills. According to her academic dosimeter, she’s acquired more education than any self-respecting person might consider wise. She enjoys deep diving into technology and has written, co-written, and contributed to dozens of books about computing and digital media. Sadun has blogged at TUAW, Ars Technica, O’Reilly, and Lifehacker. She has also authored more rejected Swift Language proposals than anyone else.

Füsun Wehrmann

Füsun Wehrmann is a technology lover, an engineer and a leader who also cares deeply about product management, happy and effective teams, diverse and high performing organisations. After her computer science studies, she worked as a data engineer, a system administrator and an architect for banks and big corporations for several years. She has been at senior engineering and leadership positions at various enterprises with distributed teams in her career including Vodafone, Microsoft, Axel Springer, and Xing. She cares a lot about startups, young talents and innovation in all environments. She has mentored many startups and NGOs as a Google Launchpad Mentor since 2015. Until recently, she was leading the cloud-based global Berlin Tech Hub of the OLX Group, a Naspers company in Berlin which has over 37 billion monthly page views every month in 40+ countries. She will join Wayfair as the director supply chain engineering in July for building a world class delivery service for Europe.

Glenna Buford

Glenna Buford is a Senior Software Engineer at 8fit. She has expertise in both iOS and Android development, and loves shipping new content and features to users regularly. In her spare time, she’s a director of Women Who Code Berlin and co-founder/organizer of Girls’ Games Workshops. When she’s not computering, she’s usually trying new beers or travelling.

Julia Roggatz

Julia Roggatz is a freelance iOS developer with a passion for creating delightful user interfaces. She’s currently working with a fully-remote research lab, building experimental prototypes that explore what the future of tablet computing for creativity and productivity could look like.

Julia started dabbling in graphic and web design as a young teenager, but didn’t discover her passion for programming until attending university. Flash and ActionScript first made things click for her, and a few years later she fell in love with iOS and never looked back. She’s worked for startups (Wooga, Clue) and a big companies (KAYAK) before becoming a freelancer and part-time digital nomad.

In her non-screen time, she is a DIY home improver, hobby mixologist, and hammock enthusiast.

Julietta Yaunches

Julietta Yaunches is a technologist & solutions architect with deep expertise in helping businesses to move more nimbly with technology. She is experienced in driving decision making that must move a business forward and ahead of competition but do so with a technology roadmap that is realistic and effective.

With 13 years experience across web and mobile platform engineering Julietta has worked across a plethora of technologies and knows how to bring together the right set for the situation at hand. She’s led teams, performed interim CTO responsibilities and released countless software products into user markets.

Kate Castellano

Kate Castellano is a Senior iOS Developer at Clue. She has expertise in Swift and enjoys playing with Raspberry Pi’s and ARKit. When she is not coding, you can find her working towards the inclusion of more women in technology as a Director at Women Who Code Berlin Chapter.

Kaya Thomas

Kaya Thomas is an iOS engineer at Slack on the Messaging team working on Notifications and Accessibility. She graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in Computer Science. In the summer of 2014, Kaya launched We Read Too, a book resource app that features titles written by authors of color. Recently, she was featured in the App Store about We Read Too and what inspired her to create it. Aside from coding, she also enjoys writing and has bylines in Smashing Magazine, TechCrunch and Fusion.

Kristina Fox

Kristina Fox is a Senior iOS Engineer at Intuit where she works on the QuickBooks Self-Employed app. She writes tutorials and technical commentary on iOS and watchOS development on her website. As an international speaker, she has presented on topics ranging from Apple Watch development to using technical writing to advance engineering skills. Her past speaking events include talks at AltConf, NSSpain, iOSDevUK and many more. Kristina’s main goal in life is to consume as much avocado toast as she can. She also enjoys watching cat videos and twittering.

Lea Marolt Sonnenschein

Lea Marolt Sonnenschein spent three years in New York, working on the iOS application for Rent the Runway and teaching Swift at General Assembly. Now, she’s getting a masters in Innovation Design Engineering in London, and spends most of her time playing with sensors and microcontrollers. She writes articles focused on design and usability for raywenderlich.com, and is the author of one of the most popular video courses on the site, Reproducing Popular iOS Controls.

Lisa Dziuba

Lisa Dziuba is a co-founder of Flawless App, a company making tools for iOS developers & designers. With tech background and 6-years business expertise, Lisa is leading marketing, community building, and customer development. She built a company from scratch, with clients from 61 countries including teams at Uber, Basecamp, Spotify, Nike.

Lisa loves releasing useful things. She is maintaining a blog for the iOS community with 70+ articles, Marketing for Engineers (open-source learning resource), Awesome Design Tools (300 design tools, trending for a month on GitHub). In free time, Lisa sends PRs to iOS Goodies, paints and helps other makers launch their products.

Nataliya Patsovska

Nataliya Patsovska is a software engineer with a passion for testing and system design. She loves opportunities to improve the quality and processes in her work - whether it is for a small agency or big international companies like Spotify and currently iZettle. You would often find her taking lead on initiatives, experimenting with developer tools and sharing her findings in various ways. Hailing from Bulgaria, she is now based in Sweden, and enjoys being part of a newly born design platform team, meeting interesting people from all over the world and long summer nights.

Neha Kulkarni

Neha Kulkarni is an iOS Engineer at POF living in beautiful Vancouver. She worked at Starbucks & Disney before. She is passionate about anything iOS, especially enjoys dealing with platform issues, design and process improvements. She is also a contributor at Women Who Code Vancouver chapter.

Sally Shepard

Sally Shepard is an iOS developer, accessibility consultant, writer and hardware hacker who has worked on a wide variety of award winning apps. Before the iPhone existed, she studied audio engineering, a field which combined her love of music and tinkering with expensive hardware. She lives in London and in her spare time she enjoys playing any instrument with strings, attaching sensors to her cat and taking pictures with vintage cameras.

Shannon Hughes

Shannon Hughes is an iOS and Mac developer at the Omni Group. She studied Computer Science once upon a time, but had been away from it for many years by the time she purchased her first iPhone and decided to write an app while her children napped. Having come to software development after being a full-time mom, she’s still pretty jazzed that she gets paid to understand, refactor, and write code. She loves making things with code, with words, and with yarn.